Tawodi Sailing Adventures

Friday June, 26^th, 2009 and that’s a wrap. 

After a night of dodge-boating with the fishing fleet south of the Coronado Islands- what fun having those killing machines plow right for you with their deer stunning deck lights blaring full in the face- we arrived outside of San Diego Bay early Friday morning.

By 7:30 the Captain was at the top of the mast putting up our last flag and our welcoming committee had sent young Carl, in a ponga, out past the Point to find us- make sure we were really arriving. 

By 8am we were inside and greeted by a small flotilla of sailboats and one, Carl driven ponga, and here one must give full respect to all those who dragged their butts and their boats onto the bay at that hour on a Friday morning. Maybe they were all just making sure we couldn’t change our minds, turn around and decide to go to the other end of the globe. There they were, smiling, sailing, snapping photos.  Makes us believe that maybe a few people really do like us, maybe even missed us. 

And then there were the hugging arms on the customs dock.

And then there was the guy from the television station.

And then there was the customs officials.

And then a whitewash flood of humanity coming to shake our hands, smile at us, laugh, congratulate, throw food our way, query us and then shake our hands one more time.

Thus endeth this part of the odyssey.

Next chapter: jobs, laundry and settling back into our own country.

But first, before moving on to anything else we must give a special thanks to our families for helping to make us this crazy, to the Pacific Seafarer’s Ham Radio Net for being with us every day of the voyage, to Guy Stevens for building our website, to Larry Gahagan for throwing our story around at West Marine, to Robert Knight, the Captain’s brother, for maintaining the web postings,  to Steve Cannon, the Bromley family, Grant and Zoetje Maddock, Gordon Caley and the Otago Yacht Club, David Brown and all the others we’re forgetting who worked so hard to make their home country feel like our home country.

An extra special thank you to Marti Cunningham for working to make sure we got media coverage on coming home and to John and Carol Vernon and the Richardson Family for taking care of our stuff, us, our transportation needs, our parties and – Carol – I cannot believe you hand rolled all those coins we left behind in October.

And to Kitty- for everything.

And lastly.  One incredibly large plate of gratitude from me to my Captain.  What I have done I could never have done without him.  He gave me the world.  It was not always fun but it was always one hell of a story.

Thank You Stephen.

And to all of you.  Much love from us.  Thanks for coming along for the ride and, we promise, we’ll get some new photos up real gosh darn soon.

30.41 N 117.45 W 120 miles south of San Diego
Eight months spiced with a handful of days; the time it took us to chase the sun around the bottom of the globe. We left San Diego, California on October 20th, at the tail-end of hurricane season 2008, scurrying after summer in the Southern Oceans and crossing back out of the tropics at the face-end of hurricane season 2009. It’s a heck of a thing to race the seasons, to race the sun all around this planet.

All that rush, all that comedy, tragedy, work and expense allowed by the Southern Hemisphere and there we were, off Guadalupe Island, Mexico, with scant time for one last bit of commotion: participating in an elaborate Abalone relocation program.
The Captain calls it catch and release but that phrase is a smidgeon too terse. What Bob and Stan, the Abalone, went through rivals the machinations of most Witness relocation programs. Catch and release makes it sound, at worst, briefly violent- catch, swim around with, toss, carry, drop, pry, transfer and then release- that’s more the way Bob and Stan’s experience went.

Peeled off whatever slab of ocean they clung to, slapped down into a fading, oil stained Mexican fishing ponga, puttered up to the side of Tawodi, unceremoniously thumped onto our decks, thus began Bob and Stan’s adventure. In exchange for them, the Abalone, two smiling Mexican fishermen were looking for beer or wine. Cerveza o Vino. The Captain explained; inflatable globe- replete with magic-marker tracings of our journey- in one hand, the other gesturing its way through his Spanish vocabulary, that May 3rd had been the last time we’d been remotely near someplace that might sell such liquid refreshment but that we had water- good, home-made, fresh water. Yummy water. They settled for that, the wondrous elixir of life, but wouldn’t take Bob and Stan back- even after we said- No, No thank you, No Gracias, No, really, No, please por favor, no. No, No, No, Bob and Stan stayed on our deck in their puddle of brown ocean ooze. We waved and smiled and off went the fishermen and here stayed the Abalone.
Bob and Stan got scooped off the deck and put into the handiest container available- a dirty saucepan.

From dirty saucepan the were plunked into a soup pot.

They got a little too intimate with the soup-pot- sucky, squishy parts latching on while wavy little feelers poked about- a butter knife was used to convince them they would be much better off squidging about inside a yellow, plastic Tidy Cat clumping kitty litter bucket- let’s be frank here- there just wasn’t enough room for them and all there clinging and squirting in the soup-pot.

It was in that butter knife, prying off, transfer from soup-pot to plastic bucket that the Captain committed the sin of calling them pets.

I would have been forever content thinking of them as things just to one side of extra-terrestrial poop but then he called them pets.

Call a living thing a pet around me and it will, first, be named- hence: Bob and Stan, the Abalone- and, second, no longer be available as a meal item. I mean who would want to sit down and have Fluffy for dinner, that would just be wrong. So it went for Bob and Stan.
They spent an hour or so glued to yellow plastic. At the north end of the island we dropped them back into the water and wished them well.

And there went our last, tiny adventure before calling an end to this globe circling odyssey.
As for other end of days bits of news;we ate the last of the potatoes. It might be a while before either of us have a hankering for either potatoes, beans or rice. We’ll finish off the onions and the one remaining orange today and then Friday morning we’ll be shoving our nose into the waters of San Diego Bay.

We’re aiming to be close to Ballast Point, near the submarine base, around 8am. We welcome, whole-heartedly with open arms and big smiles, anyone wanting to come out and escort us back into our home waters. If you can’t make it onto the water, the good ship Tawodi will be tied up at the San Diego transient docks on Shelter Island, for about a week after our arrival. Come down, say hello, take a tour, swap stories and help us revel a little in the joy of being home.

23.09 N 121.52 W 620 miles southwest of San Diego
Wariness keeps talk of finishing this voyage to a minimum. Like the saying about never asking a woman if she’s pregnant unless you actually see a baby coming out of her, we’re circumspect of calling this journey done until a nice U.S. Customs officer welcomes us back into our country.

So here’s us on Father’s day and summer solstice, paying for these last drops of water slipping under the keel with either fossil fuel or sleep or both. Light and variable is what they call our present conditions. There are other, less pleasant words, that one might use to properly describe the sensation of just enough wind, on one side or the other of Tawodi’s nose, to make going where we want to go feel like we’ve become hapless salmon swimming upstream, but those words are best left mumbled quietly to oneself.
We tack from one side to the other and back and then we do it again. The wind falters and we motor sail. The wind collapses, we put the sails away and motor. The wind resuscitates itself and we reverse the circle; motor sail, sail, tack, tack, tack. We stare at the weather picture and find ourselves weirdly longing for a low pressure system, granted the longing is for a low pressure system confined within a rather demanding set of parameters.

Sleep ships itself off our vessel as the whimsy of our situation demands constant attention, constant fussing. Odd to realize how much simpler it was to work through a 40 knot blow, there’s not much more to do than set your self and your sails and wait it out. 10 to 15 knots shifting about here and there and voila: now you must do more than sponge the water off the floor and hold on, now there’s sail handling, course management, choice.
Fortune gives us all this work in company with mild temperatures, postcard sunsets and enough wisdom to let us realize what our work is purchasing; home and the chance for more than an hours worth of uninterrupted sleep.

Until then we grow punchier by the day and down caffeine as if it were the elixir of life. Until then we note the passage of our eighth month since our beginning, the arrival of summer solstice and, most cogently, Father’s day.

A happy wish to all the Fathers out there, most especially, our very own.

12.18 N 120.32 W 1244 miles south west of San Diego
For the curious, voyaging through the doldrums, in smell and sound, bears an uncanny resemblance to a diesel engine; a Yanmar 3GM30 running at about 2100 r.p.m, if one cares to be a wee bit specific. For fifty hours we played at being a motor boat- an occupation that doesn’t sit well with Captain, Crew or boat- mowing our way through the trough of water that sits still and quiet, like neutral territory, between the North and the South halves of our planet. It was our decompression chamber, a spacious, hot, slow place to shake the last of the Southern Ocean tremors before venturing home.
A little over two days roasting under a fireball and cotton-ball crammed sky that held only the smallest whiff of a breeze, the ocean rolling languidly away like gray-blue satin, undulating and greasy as it fell towards the horizon. The yellow heat giving way to the dark blue shade of twilight, clouds silhouetted into creatures from a child’s shadow box- a lion, a bear, a goose, one lonely platypus and then all of it fading into the small lights of night. Stars and planets winking coquettishly and then the moon’s half lit face, turned down as if she were looking for a little something she dropped, came up, her glow leaving a golden wavering trail across the skin of our ocean.
On the second day plowing along, we found the swim- area. It’s marked by the water climbing over 80 degrees Fahrenheit We cleaned off the barnacles that had found purchase since leaving Pitcairn Island. We put our faces in the water and watched the light fall through the blue until it disappeared into the black. We lapped around our home a few times and then moved on.

By that night the air had again found its wind, which leaves us here; hard over on starboard, leaning precipitously close to 30 degrees of heel, tiller lashed, number two headsail replaced by the handkerchief of the number three, main reefed and Captain and Crew three point braced even in our sleep. One day nothing and the next, too much and all of it being thrown into our face. So much of this sailing habit feels like maneuvering through the whims of an overly clever two year old; one day charming, one day sullen, one day precocious to a point well beyond the realm of cute.
This is the last bit of precociousness we have to face, this hammering through an over bright and over ambitious wind tunnel. The press and pound of it, all so familiar, only now we’re warm to the point of leaving pools of sweat when we stay in one place too long and, now, we’re within weeks of being home. Along with the sound, the fury, the oozing swelter,the gravitational force pulling us into the stove’s flame, we also have a precious few nights to enjoy the spark of both hemisphere’s skies. Behind us the Southern cross tilts its way across the black globe and ahead of us Polaris dimly shutters its eye; the tell of where we’ve been and the lamp that points the way home.

Apt slivers of light to remind us of all we’ve seen and all we have to look forward to.

2.30 N 123.30 W 1870 miles south of San Diego
On November 14th, 2008, at 06:00 we crossed the equator and slipped ourselves into the southern hemisphere. Yesterday morning, June 9th, 2009, at 05:30 we crossed it again. 7 months, 2 continents, 3 oceans, 6 islands, countless icebergs and more storms than we care to remember; a paltry enumeration of our time down under.

This last border returns us to our home quarter of the globe and leaves us with a single small invisible line left to step over; 120 degrees west longitude. Traverse that boundary and we’re back in our home time zone.
A friend noted that it must be hard to not spend our last days anticipating the end instead of living in the here and now. Hard? Truculent grade school children two weeks away from the beginning of summer vacation, just about piddling themselves in eagerness to get to that moment, have nothing on us. Only the constraints of playing at being adults keeps us from fidgeting and waving our hands about like a couple of feral beasts of impatience.

Funny how foolish it is and, yet, still we wile away the tropics contemplating our future of repairs, rent, laundry and Santana’s California Burritos. We trot out schemes and plans, stretch out the architecture of the ‘next big thing’ while apricot cloud skies and butterfly wing breezes roll over us. Fortunately, just at a moment when the vicissitudes and plots of a life still weeks away threatens to overwhelm, there come the dolphins.
Scores of dolphins loping past, as if we had accidentally plowed our way onto an aquatic freeway. For three hours dolphins skim along the hull, their chirrups, whistles and snorts whispering past Tawodi. The contemplation of employment and bills, of personal economies, favorite restaurants and adventures not yet dreamed of, set aside to watch a world swim by.

A moment to wonder if our mothers have ever seen a thing like this or our brothers, sisters in law, fathers, step mothers, step fathers, have the friends we left behind in high-school seen this world? Not to long ago someone asked why we would go all the way round the world and see so little of it- disbelief, disdain hidden away behind the question. A strange query when considering how much we have seen. Not cities or traffic and, true, not many people, but a different piece of the world- hard, cold, beautiful in all its terror and power. A royal albatross gliding along in 60 knots of wind, the hiss of a melting iceberg, miles and miles of dolphins. These are the things of a world that gives a body pause, forces the mind back into an existence of here and now.
The pull of home and the adventure of recreating a life that involves paychecks and bills looms as large as an elephant in a corner ice-cream shop, but we’re managing, perhaps only just, to shove the pachyderm into a corner and enjoy the ice cream.
The wind sputtered down into an insubstantial wheeze today so now we motor sail forward. Our great work at hand involves not letting sweat puddle into our meals, keeping an eye out for Polaris- how we’ve missed that dim little light, discussing the merits of the powdered ice cream and yogurt we bought in New Zealand and enjoying the moment at hand along with all the sweet dreaming of the moment of homecoming.

5.02 S 127.24 W 2385 miles south of San Diego
Obscurity walks companionably with an ordinary life. Risk, adventure, that arrogant body slam of defying death; these are relished, but, the simple life? It’s predictable, mundane to the edge of forgettable.
Here we are riding along through a piece of simple life. Trade winds, warm water, warm air, beam reaching on starboard; same as yesterday and the day before, likely the same tomorrow. What is there to tell?
This thing of the simple life is that it’s like a bald man wearing a hat; underneath there’s a secret horde of pertinent detail.

Our horde, a line of squalls, runs by every night. They charge in and about with the apocryphal fervency of fire driven wild animals. Twice we have been caught in their stampede, twice we’ve lost footing and been left clambering to reduce sail. Once, like a penance for our abundance of sail cloth, we were pummeled, bitten, sniped at by angry hail. And lest everyone get up in arms over our lack of appropriate reaction, there’s more to the reductive failure than laziness, really.
A golden line hooked through us, a strange force of gravity pulling harder and harder has put a relentless drive into our journey. We feel home pulling inexorably. A haul strong enough that slowing down, even for squalls, feels painful. We see the squalls and hope to carry through. Twice we’ve miscalculated and, thusly, twice we’ve been lucky. Caution it seems, as the smell of home lingers just beyond the horizon, has become a vague crew member. Not gone just elbowed aside a bit.

We have; boat, Captain, crew and voyage itself, become a perpetual motion machine. After nearly 8 months the desire to change that designation, even if only slightly, balloons with each passing mile. Even in this, our simple life, there is no off switch, no break room, no weekend respite. A ceaseless demand for attention, like an infant that never sleeps; that’s what a sail boat underway requires.
Our moment’s fortune lies in the quality of sea-scape we cross on this last leg home. Here, in this tropical band of our planet, here is where the colour and shadow of divinity play in an endless loop. Pick a religion, a spiritual path, a dogma short of Satanism; pick it’s favored backdrop and here, in this region, you will find the home for all that gold, all that lavender, for the stunning shift of light through cloud, for the huge magnificence of an orange moon being swallowed by a running squall, for the sudden shimmer of 42 flying fish gliding frantically over the waves.

Here is where we stand with cameras snapping, snapping, snapping with the dimmest hope of holding the hue and geometry of a moment. A moment gone and replaced before our fingers can press a button, snap a shot, catch a hold of heaven; mercurial, ephemeral beauty eternally lunging past.

Such is our simple life, a rush headlong through a palette of wonders. Perhaps not as thrilling as icebergs, broken boat parts and the crap of Southern Ocean storms but, certainly, a thing due more than obscurity.

15.47 S 128.57 W 3084 miles south of San Diego
Only one out of four solar panels works- this due to corroding electrical connections housed in tragically inadequate bits of plastic. The autopilot drives and drives and chews away insatiably at our stock of electrons. The engine blower died a quiet death deep in the bowels of the engine compartment. And I spend every evening steering under starry skies while the Captain gives position and the state of our world to the Pacific Seafarer’s Radio net.
Such are the characters of our latest Tragic Comedy. After six months plowing under the dismal pall of perpetually gray skies we sail under the beaming of a beaming sunlit sky but our solar array is mostly deceased. After six months of salvaging electrons using the windvane, the loss of its waterblade forces the relentless use of our energy greedy autopilot. After six months scraping and saving every infinitesimal bit of energy in a quest to avoid running the dinosaur-bone burner, we now have to run the engine once a day to keep up with the autopilot, to replace the electrons we’d hoped to get from the solar array. After six months of freezing our narrow butts into an even tighter state of existence, praising every slice of heat that might be had with the greatest of ardor, we now use our engine every day without the benefit of a blower, a blower that might move at least a fraction of a wedge of the meat-cooking heat out of our living space and so, here we are, in the tropics, roasting alive.

What sweet irony.
And for the last character in this play of trying to get home, there I am sitting outside steering in the beauty of a tropical night. I can handle swamped cockpits, 60 knot winds, knock-downs, icebergs, rogue waves that are so rogue they make the word rogue seem inadequate, mold with the will of a religious fanatic, incessantly wet floors, toilets threatening to quit and a living space that smells alternately of mildew, wet socks, old sanitation hose and diesel, but two nights ago I was reminded of what I can’t handle.
I’m sure upon hearing my screeching, the Captain thought that the Swamp Thing itself had landed in the cockpit and was forcing its dripping, gaseous, oozing self inappropriately upon me. Like a little hysterical girl the words: Get it away. Get it away. Get it away, followed by various eeks and yelps streamed out of me while I tried to shy myself into a corner as far from IT as I could.

Give me a foggy night in a sea filled with city-block sized chunks of ice but spare me the horror of a two inch flying fish flopping helplessly within three feet, no- better make that thirty feet, of my person.

Thank the heavens and the stars and God that the Captain has the courage to cope with that dreadfulness. Let us all raise a glass to him; My Hero.
And so we go on eating up the miles on our way home, lounging in the ease of trade-winds and warm water. Days come and go under the luxury of powder puff clouds that fade into orange creamsicle sunsets and sprawl into star shot midnight blue blankets. We bask and sweat and, as needed, I plug my ears and close my eyes tightly against the flopping suicide of flying fish gymnastically thumping their death knells upon our decks.

22.04 S 129.35 W 3500 miles south of San Diego
The Hill of Difficulty. Writing it down makes it sound like part of a life affirmation seminar; Climb your Hill of Difficulty and discover your true potential. Call us wary of life affirmations or just lazy but instead of climbing we got a ride on the back of Dave’s ATV.

The hill’s not the first feature one notices about Pitcairn Island. At 1 by 3 miles it’s smaller than many of the icebergs we encountered but it’s just as steep sided. There’s no sandy beach to roll around on. There’s rocks, surf hammered, boat chomping rocks. There’s coral, anchor-eating coral. There’s what remains of the Bounty sitting below ten feet of water and there’s about 50 people whiling away life on this slim bit of rock.
The Hill of Difficulty starts at the boat landing and claws its way up to Adamstown. Plantains, papayas, breadfruit, lianas, bamboo and a host of other green things poke out of every nook and cranny. Lizards scurry and terns circle endlessly above. The sheer audacity of rock cliffs make for a jaw-dropping slice of scenery but take on a worrisome quality when they’re dubbed with names like Howland Falls, McCoy Drop, Dan Fall, Headache and Down the God. Don’t think for a minute that Howland or Dan Fall has anything to do with waterfalls. Of course there’s also Johncatchacow and Up the Beans to make up for any looming sense of disaster.

Lush, beautiful, eccentric, semi-tropical, its only tragic downfall seems to be the mosquito and gnat. Nothing like flying bloodsuckers to mediate a happy, happy, joy spot.
Bit of a whirlwind tour for us. Arrived Thursday, the anchor barely scraping bottom before Brenda- Immigration Brenda- had scampered on to our boat, stamped our passports and scampered off. She had some fishing to do. Quarantine and Health met us at the landing, stuck papers in front of us and then rode off on their ATVs.

A fish fry that evening in a square bordered by the public hall, the postoffice, the store, the Seventh Day Adventist Church and the anchor off the Bounty. A talk at the school the next morning. A bit of cleaning and some odd repairs and then it was Saturday morning and the anchorage had turned into something akin to an amusement park ride maintained and run by a psychotic.

We left.

We would have stayed but getting sea-sick at anchor is low on the list of fun things to do.
And so now we’re beam reaching under jib alone in 20 knots of wind. Have been since we left. Looks like we will be for the foreseeable future. Threatens to become appallingly pleasant for us. Good lord we’re in the tropics and find ourselves staring at water and air temperatures reaching strangely unfamiliar numbers. What is this 70 degrees Fahrenheit thing we keep seeing? What does it mean to be go in water that won’t kill us within five minutes?

Occasional squalls keep things mildly entertaining. We toy with the notion of putting up the main or flying a spinnaker but then a blob of weather appears on the radar, comes along and shoves us about and the main and spinnaker stay happily unused. Averaging better than 7 knots with jib alone, who are we to screw with the fates?

And that leads us right up to tomorrow.

June 1st. The Captain’s birthday. The Captain’s, Randy’s, Tom’s, Ariel’s, Jano’s, Jan’s, Rafe’s, Kyle’s and there’s a few I know I’m missing. However you look at it, June 1st seems like a good day to have a party and wish everyone well.

A large and joy filled Happy Birthday to all of you but especially to my Captain.